Creative Think: New York Times Praises New Whack Edition

Roger von Oech

This put a big smile on my face.

It's from today's New York Times. It's from a review in their business section:

Let’s start with the best: A Whack on the Side of the Head (Business Plus), a book about increasing creativity, has just been reissued to celebrate its 25th anniversary and it is easy to understand its lasting appeal.

The author, Roger von Oech, a consultant, has taken an abstract subject — how to think differently — and made it concrete by asking a series of questions, all of which involve breaking what he calls the mental locks that bind our thinking.

He suggests breaking the locks by acknowledging that they are there and forcing yourself to pry them open.

We are typically taught, for example, that there is one right answer to a problem. But, he says, keep searching even after you find it. After all, as Linus Pauling, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in chemistry and the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize, put it, “The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.”

—The New York Times,
Business Section,
May 27, 2008

The whole article is here. It is from Paul Brown's Small Business column, and is entitled "Small-Business Books that Break the Mold." Thanks Paul! I'm delighted, naturally!